


gnawing my heart away hungrily

by blackwood (transjon)



Series: never dream of you again [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Catboys & Catgirls, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Abuse, Self-Esteem Issues, Trauma Recovery, detailed warnings for past abuse in notes, mentions of disordered eating & starvation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-25
Updated: 2020-11-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:54:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,237
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27715717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/transjon/pseuds/blackwood
Summary: For the first month Jon sleeps on the floor.
Relationships: Past Elias Bouchard/Jonathan Sims - Relationship, martin blackwood/jonathan sims (minor)
Series: never dream of you again [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2027144
Comments: 16
Kudos: 181





	gnawing my heart away hungrily

**Author's Note:**

  * For [GrangeLady](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrangeLady/gifts).



> title is from untitled by the cure
> 
> you dont HAVE to read the first fic in this series but like. this will make infinitely more sense if you do?
> 
> additional content warnings for mentions/discussion of past,  
> \- dehumanization (external & currently internalized)  
> \- domestic violence (mental and physical)  
> \- starvation/food intake control/disordered eating/warped relationships with food
> 
> also cw for,  
> \- good intentions doesnt always read as helpful or respectful (and isnt always either)  
> \- coworkers/kinda friends poking heads into stuff thats not any of their business  
> \- what can be read as forcing someone to eat / controlling food intake in the opposite way. jon sorta reads it that way  
> \- dehumanization but like, with Good Intentions

For the first month Jon sleeps on the floor. 

It’s strictly practical, he tells himself. He’s got a duvet and a pillow but the bed belongs to Elias. Whether he’s gone or not is inconsequential. It’s Elias’. Jon leaves it behind. 

The cat bed he puts in one of the dusty corners of the relatively cheap studio flat he’d managed to land. He eyes it, sometimes, from where he’s curled up underneath the duvet. He’d put it through the wash before taking it, and it no longer smells like anything but detergent. It feels –

It feels wrong to sleep on it. In it. Whatever. Like –

Like the comfort is too much. Too little. Like there is no meaningful difference between the bed and the floor. Like the floor comes without any of the baggage. Like the bed is maybe more comfortable, but emotionally more exhausting. 

The hardwood floors are old and wonky and uneven. Jon wakes up with a sore back. Just a few more weeks, he thinks as he gets dressed blearily in the near-darkness, just a few more weeks and maybe he’ll look into buying a bed. 

–

There’s this weird silence that falls over the entire section of the building whenever Jon walks in these days. 

Sasha and Tim and Martin. The way they look at him. Not pity, Jon tries to tell himself. His tail goes between his legs and then curls around one of them as he walks. None of them try to follow him into his office, which is good, because his office is possibly the safest place he can think of, most days. Just him and those stacks of papers to throw himself into. How he can open the windows, even if the only smell that ever comes into his office through them is petrol. 

Sometimes, some days, he goes into the now vacant office that still smells like Elias’ cologne. And dust, too, now. Mostly dust, really, but the undertones of sandalwood and eucalyptus still linger, somewhere underneath all that, just like the feeling of Elias’ touch seems to linger in his mind, somewhere underneath what is real. 

Martin catches him one day. “Jon?” he says softly. Jon turns around, startled, and Martin smiles at him hesitantly. “What are you doing here?”

Would Martin understand? The conflict of grief and relief? Missing someone that doesn’t exist? Didn’t exist? Who might still exist, in a closed box somewhere? Gasping for air that simply isn’t there with his fingers clenched into fists? 

“Looking for some files,” he settles on. 

Martin nods. He’s holding the cup of tea he’s got with both hands, fingers overlapping each other. “Do you want help?”

Jon stills. The tip of his tail flicks, just once. “No, thank you.”

Martin’s voice goes all low. “I’m here,” he says, “if you need anything.”

Jon knows it’s not about the files. He feels oddly condescended to. He feels awkward. “Thanks,” he says. “I’ll let you know.”

–

Jon, in his flat, the one he hasn’t yet decorated, in any sense of the word. Bare and cold. The only piece of furniture is the rickety barstool he’d seen out on the street in front of a house and brought home almost absently. Eventually he’s going to buy a – something. His claws come out. He draws them back in. At some point he’ll need a mattress, he settles on. And a bedframe. His back keeps killing him. The cat bed in the corner looms emotionally over him. Almost like it’s taunting him. Saying this is all you deserve. This is all you’ll ever have. 

–

And sometimes he wonders, what would Elias do if he saw him right now? 

Him, on his hands and knees, one end of the soft blanket he’d finally ended up buying in his mouth, kneading the rest of it with his hands, claws digging into the soft material of it as he purrs, breathy and fast? 

His ears pull back. Tail between his legs. His hands still. Elias wouldn’t like it. Elias wouldn’t let him keep the blanket. It’d become Elias’ blanket. Maybe, he thinks longingly, maybe if Elias wrapped himself in the blanket he’d allow for Jon to take his fingers in his mouth and then knead the soft fabric as long as he kept his claws away. He wonders if that would ever happen. Probably not. 

It’s a weird feeling – like he’s lost something he’s holding in his grasp at the very moment. Like the loss of it is so imminent that it might as well already be gone. Jon closes his eyes. Will he come back? 

He’s allowed to eat now, he supposes. He keeps forgetting. Tim claims that he accidentally made too many leftovers and brings him a hot thermos full of soup and then he watches Jon eat, and Jon, unsure of if it’s a trick of some sort, tries to finish the entire thing despite his shaking hands. 

“You don’t have to finish it,” Tim says finally, good natured and light. “I’m not going to be _mad_.”

Jon flinches. The spoon in his hand collides with the coated metal of the thermos. “Of course,” he says softly, and then louder, with more authority, “that would be silly.”

Would it be? Tim looks at him with these eyes. Jon looks away. The soup is good. If Elias saw –

Elias can’t see, he thinks. Elias isn’t here. Tim, on the other hand, watches him. Tim doesn’t know things about him, so Tim doesn’t know what Elias would do. At least not that Jon is aware. Tim and Jon are both equally in the dark about each other’s feelings and emotions and thoughts. It’s oddly comforting. 

–

“Martin?” Jon calls after him. The tea mug feels heavy in his hands. 

Martin turns around in the doorway. “Yeah?”

For a second Jon wants very badly to say nevermind. Say thanks for the tea but please don’t come back in again today. Say sorry didn’t mean to worry you so much and for so long for no good reason at all. He swallows. 

“Do you,” clears his throat, “I’m trying to buy a bed, but I don’t drive. Do you know anyone who could,” swallows again, “help me?”

If Martin notices how small he feels immediately after the words leave his mouth he doesn’t comment on it. 

“Oh,” he says, and then makes a thoughtful humming sound. “I have a friend who has a car. I could ask her? But I think Ikea delivers, too?”

Jon sighs, relieved. “Oh! That’s good.”

“Mm,” Martin says, and then smiles. “Upgrading?”

Jon thinks about the bare floors of his flat. The pile of blankets on the floor by the radiator where it doesn’t get quite so cold. 

“You could say that,” he says, and then, somewhat carelessly, he smiles. 

–

There’s this lull between each day where Jon almost feels like the current version of his life maybe isn’t completely real. 

Grocery store flowers wilting by the store entrance where they’re exposed to the cold evening air with each opening of the automatic doors. No Elias. Jon goes to Tesco after work and picks up a reduced price ready meal on its last day before it expires and eats it for dinner. Macaroni and cheese, this time. Not that he can’t afford anything else, but he doesn’t have the energy to cook, still, and this way he at least can be helpful in some way. Cut down on food waste and all that. 

The new bed comes and Jon has to buy a screwdriver and he figures it might as well be an electric one. It’s weird, he thinks, there in the checkout lane, holding the screwdriver in its plastic packaging in his hand. How he’s doing all these things now. Going out and buying things. It’s been a while. Before Elias left him he’d just go to work and come back home again. Elias did all the shopping. 

It’s so mundane. It’s so exciting.

–

“Jon,” Sasha starts, “have you thought about getting therapy?”

Her voice is so uncharacteristically gentle when she says this that Jon almost starts laughing. His mouth twitches before he can stop himself. “I’m fine,” he says. 

Sasha makes a face. “You’re not,” she starts again but cuts herself off. Jon watches her cheeks move as she bites her tongue physically. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m meddling. It’s none of my business.”

“A little,” Jon says mildly. More than a little. A lot is more like it. He smiles anyway. “Is that all?”

“We’re going out for drinks after work,” she says. “Do you want to come?”

Jon keeps his face carefully neutral. The statements in front of him don’t say anything at all. No easy answers today, he supposes. No answers at all. “Sure,” he settles on finally.

There’s no real reason for Sasha to smile. She does anyway. 

–

Jon sleeps in his big bed and wakes up to the sun rising up in the sky and watches the orange light slowly illuminate the wall across from the bed. Nestled between the mattress and the duvet he almost feels like a person. His heart, lodged between the back of his throat and the middle of his trachea, pounds. No nightmares. No back pain.

“Good morning,” Tim says when he walks in. “You’re looking chipper. Sleep well?”

Jon smiles at him. It’s genuine. “I did.”

Tim approaches, and for a moment Jon thinks he’s going to slap him on the back, like how friends do, all excited and happy, but before his hand touches Jon’s back he pulls back. “Oh,” he says, less upbeat, “can I touch you?”

Jon’s tail twitches in the shape of the letter Z before settling into a straight line again without any input from him. “Why are you asking?”

Tim’s hand hovers in midair for a moment and then falls back down. It’d been the wrong answer, then. “Just figured I’d ask,” he says, a little unsure. 

Jon isn’t _stupid_. He’s not unaware of the way his coworkers keep treating him like he’s somewhere between too fragile to handle anything and too naive to understand his own fragility. It makes him angry, suddenly. Like this is a ball that’s been slowly getting bigger inside of him until it got too close to bursting.

“Do you ask Martin? If you’re allowed to pat him on the back?”

“Martin’s already told me he’s fine with it.”

“You can touch me,” Jon says. The fur of his tail stands up. “You can do whatever. I don’t care.”

The look Tim gives him is worse than the question had been. Jon, both very sad and very angry, starts walking and doesn’t stop until he hits the back wall of his office. 

–

When Martin shares snacks with him it’s more lowkey than Tim pretending poorly that he’s accidentally made a full meal more than he’d meant to and then accidentally brought that to work with him. 

Martin brings a bag of crisps and eats them absently from the bag until he’s suddenly had enough of them and shoves the bag at Jon, going “I’m going to finish this whole thing if you don’t help me.” Martin eats a whole box of Jaffa cakes and gives every third to Jon, who obediently eats the biscuits he’s handed. That sort of stuff.

Or, on some days, Martin frets over the fact that he’d seen a meal deal too good in value to pass up on and before he’d had the opportunity to consider whether he’d actually be able to finish the whole thing himself he’d already been out of the store with it. He sits with Jon, and shoves the sandwich at Jon, and asks, quite sheepishly, “do you want this?”

Jon rarely considers what he wants. He wants many things. It’s hard to get used to being able to have those things. An entire cake from the M&S bakery. A nice winter coat. “Sure,” he says. He does want the sandwich. Sandwiches are safe and they’re familiar. They’re things he can want.

Martin doesn’t watch him finish his food like Tim does. Martin eats his lunch and scrolls on his phone and scoffs every now and then, or laughs at something, and he takes sips from his drink. Jon eats in silence as well. Eventually Martin’s done with his food, and he finally looks at Jon, too, and something about being seen like that makes him feel vulnerable. He swallows the last bite of his sandwich, and Martin smiles at him. 

“Good boy,” Martin says under his breath. It’s not meant to be out loud, Jon thinks. Martin doesn’t seem to have realized he’d said it at all. Jon flushes all the way down to his chest regardless. 

(For a moment he dares to let himself imagine a continuation to this scene where Martin reaches across the table and puts a steady, warm hand on his face and tilts his jaw. Rubs his thumb over the curve of the bone. Puts the pad of the index finger of his other hand on his bottom lip. In this scene he’s scripting in his mind Martin doesn’t kiss him, but he looks at him with eyes that say he wants to. In this scene he doesn’t know if Martin’s going to take him home or not but he wants him to, not because he wants to sleep with him but because he wants to just keep existing near him for a little longer.) 

Jon closes his eyes. He imagines. He dreams. In this scenario Elias doesn’t exist. In this scenario Jon barely exists. In this scenario the answer to everything is maybe.

–

Eating cheap takeaway is better than eating ready meals is better than eating cup noodles is better than eating nothing. 

Jon sits in his flat with all the lights off. In the corner of the room the little cat bed stares at him without any eyes. Jon looks back unblinkingly. 

Can Elias see him through it? Has his consciousness manifested here, in this flat, and grounded itself in the soft fabric of the cat bed? Jon shudders as he thinks about it. He nudges one of the corners of the soft blanket he’s got draped across his shoulders into his mouth and nibbles on it gently. His claws come out, knead on the lump of blanket in his lap anxiously. He doesn’t look away from the shape of the cat bed. If Elias can see him he’ll be upset, there, in his little cell. 

Is he in a little cell? It occurs to Jon that he doesn’t really know where Elias is, exactly. 

Is Elias here? Is Elias anywhere? The end of the blanket in his mouth tastes like laundry detergent. It also smells like laundry detergent. It smells like Jon. 

–

There’s a printed out article on Sasha’s desk when he passes by it. 

Jon looks before he remembers it’s impolite to snoop. Something in the title about how to make sure you know how to treat your catperson friends. Jon’s tail twitches in aggravation. How condescending.

He’s in a bad mood the entire way to his office. Granted, it’s only a few meters, but still. He sits down, and unbuttons his jacket, and hangs it over the back of his chair. 

Like he’s some kind of an animal. Something to take care of and make sure not to hurt accidentally. Like he came with care instructions that got lost when he was delivered in a little cardboard box with breathing holes poked in so he didn’t suffocate on the way there. 

He wonders. Is that what he is? Tim asking to make sure he doesn’t feel like he’s being treated like an animal. Holding back some sort of instincts to touch him against his permission. Jon’s tail swishes angrily. Like they have to make sure they don’t accidentally see him as an animal. Like they need some kind of a guide to keep them in check. 

Outside, he has to remind himself, look outside. He counts cars, and then when that doesn’t stop him from zoning out he counts leaves instead. Brown and yellow and orange. Falling out of trees like feathers from a bird. 

When Tim and Sasha come by later with an extra coffee and an extra biscuit he takes them and smiles. He doesn’t say anything. When he walks by the clump of desks again, later, the paper is gone. In the kitchen he peels an orange and when he goes to throw away the peels the first thing he sees in the garbage bin is that article. 

Curious, he thinks idly, to go through all the trouble of printing it out just to throw it out. How strange. Jon throws the orange peels in and closes the lid again. 

–

Sometimes when he’s in bed, comfortably nestled between his mattress and duvet, the blanket he’s come to treat like a stress toy of some sort, his brain wanders over to the cat bed he’s still not done anything to. 

It’s white, Jon thinks. Or more cream than white. Fluffy and soft. It’s teddy fleece. When he kneads his paws into the fabric his claws get tangled into the threads and fibers. It’s white, and soft, and fluffy. It’s been through the wash, he remembers this, but it’s been a few months now. It probably smells less like detergent and more like his flat by now. It’s just there. 

And sometimes, some nights, all he can think of is getting _in._

So:

Jon stands next to the cat bed. Inside of it there’s the blanket that’s always been there, little black mice printed on white fabric. Jon eyes it, and thinks about the texture of it, and how it’ll move when he puts his weight in it. How it’ll contain him. 

Breathes. Breathes out. He climbs in, limbs shaking, tail between his unsteady legs, and curls into a tight ball, and waits for something to happen. 

Before. Jon gets to the end of the word in his mind and pauses. Before, when Elias was there, this would be when the lights were turned off and Elias went to bed. Right now the lights are already off. The next step of the routine can’t happen. Jon presses his face into his knees. His fingers twitch. For a second he considers trying to knead them against the fabric of the bed, just to see what it’d feel like, but his claws don’t want to come out, and his fingers don’t want to sink into the fluff. 

It’s not his bed anymore, he realizes. It doesn’t belong to him anymore. 

No Elias. No Jon. Just fabric. Tomorrow he’s going to throw it out, he decides impulsively. He’s going to get rid of it. Nothing for him in it anymore. Just fabric he can’t dig his claws into. A bed too small and uncomfortable for him to sleep in it. He’s going to throw it out. He’s going to message the group chat Tim’s made for the four of them and ask if they want to go out for dinner, or maybe for drinks. He stretches his neck out a bit so that he can bury his face into the fabric and inhale the smell. 

Outside the sound of the cars. Outside the sound of the wind. Jon wonders if it’s going to rain. If he’s going to fall asleep here.


End file.
